The Abu Ghraib Prisoner’s Dilemma Phil Carter’s Intel Dump is the place to go for real-time analysis of military issues, from a former Army officer. Reading Phil’s thoughts on the Abu Ghraib situation, I was struck by this passage: What’s worse is that other American soldiers may suffer for the brutal excesses of these MPs, […]

Bremer Then and Bremer Now Paul Bremer, Feb. 26, 2001: “The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?’ “That’s too bad. They’ve […]

Reputation Update In the previous post, I wrote that Brad DeLong might have been a bit hasty in saying, “No one, absolutely no one, is getting out of this administration with even the shreds of a reputation.” My counter example was, and so far remains, Mark McClellan (previously in charge of the FDA, now heading […]

Medicare.gov Seniors basically don’t like the Republican prescription drug plan. We’ve known that for a while (this graph shows why). This lack of enthusiasm explains why DHHS issued the infamous “video news releases” that purported to contain reporting from Karen Ryan on the myriad ways in which the new plan would be the greatest thing […]

Letter to Sinclair Broadcasting From John McCain: I write to strongly protest your decision to instruct Sinclair’s ABC affiliates to preempt this evening’s Nightline program. I find deeply offensive Sinclair’s objection to Nightline’s intention to broadcast the names and photographs of Americans who gave their lives in service to our country in Iraq. I supported […]

Postcard Update The Easter edition of my column “Postcard from Old Europe” talked about the low level of entrepreneurship in Europe. The Blog “Small Business Trends” tackles the same question – I would highly recommend looking at the whole thing. An excerpt: The entrepreneurs who are successful in the US are often considered as heroes. […]

Postcards from Old Europe – Four elections and a constitution While much of the world has it’s eyes firmly fixed on the US election in the fall, this column looks at some of the developments coming up on the European political stage. June will see elections to the European parliament and another chance at agreeing […]

Something to Hide Bush, after today’s meeting with the 9/11 Commission: “If we had something to hide we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place. We answered all their question. I came away good about the session because I wanted them to know how I set strategy, how we run the White House, […]

Unimpressive GDP Numbers From today’s BEA release of the advance estimates of first quarter GDP growth: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2004, according to advance […]

The Testimony Will Not be Televised Nor recorded. Nor transcribed. But Bush and Cheney are meeting with the 9/11 Commission today. I think The Onion has the right take on this: Cheney Wows Sept. 11 CommissionBy Drinking Glass Of WaterWhile Bush Speaks AB